NEW DELHI: The Rockefeller Foundation has announced a $75-million, or about Rs 467-crore, rural electrification programme for bringing clean power to a million people across one thousand villages in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar over the next three years through mini-grids.

The programme, ‘Smart Power for Rural Development’, aims to install 150 solar-powered mini-grids by the end of 2015, 500 by the end of 2016 and the balance in 2017 in villages which have either no or less than 10% of coverage by the national grid.

New Delhi-based Smart Power will partner energy service companies (ESCOs), telecom tower operators, investors, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and government agencies in implementing this project.

“Rural electrification is littered with philanthropy. But these ESCOs are for-profit. We’re not yet ready for the for-profit only model. That’s why we have this hybrid or blended solution at this point of time to kickstart the microgrid model,” said Judith Rodin, president at The Rockefeller Foundation.

The foundation would provide bridge loan financing to the four ESCOs -Tara Urja, OMC, Desi Power and Free Spans — in addition to providing them techno-commercial support, facilitating their agreements with telecom companies and aligning it with the government’s overarching policy.

In a conference room in midtown Manhattan on Tuesday, large screens glowed bright orange with the SunEdison logo. But the gathering was not a sales pitch for SunEdison, argued the company’s CEO, Ahmad Chatila.

“We hope next year there will be many more companies here with us, and many more after that,” Chatila told the audience during an impromptu address.

The company was front and center, however. At the Eradication of Darkness Summit this week, SunEdison announced plans to bring electricity to 20 million people by 2020, with an interim goal of lighting up 1 million homes in 2015.

The commitment would only address a fraction of the 1.3 billion people who live without electricity and the billion others who only have intermittent access to power. But it is a considerable pledge from a single company — and a helpful boost to the World Bank’s goal of getting 500 million people connected to power through private business investments.